Boston Speech Motor Control Working Group
Join the working group’s mailing list for details on upcoming meetings, all held in person at BU.
Since August 2014, Sargent College has sponsored the Boston Speech Motor Control Working Group, the goal of which is to bring Boston-area researchers and students together to share ideas and recent findings in the area of speech motor control.
The group is run by the Stepp Lab and meets every semester in person at Boston University. Students and postdoctoral fellows present their work and work in progress at each meeting, allowing for early feedback and dissemination among our community. The goal is to generate active, respectful discussion and provide supportive feedback.
If you would like to give a talk, contact Dr. Stepp at cstepp@bu.edu.
2023-24 Meetings
October 16, 2023 | Sargent College, Room 101
Kimberly Dahl, doctoral candidate, Stepp Lab at Boston University, “Quantity of speech presented to listeners affects estimates of the intelligibility of people with Parkinson’s disease”
Xiaofeng Liu, instructor, JW Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard, “Speech motion anomaly detection via cross-modal translation of 4D motion fields from tagged MRI”
Hilary Miller, doctoral candidate, Guenther Lab at Boston University, “Speech motor sequence learning in primary progressive aphasia and related dementias”
2022-23 Meetings
June 12. 2023
Boston Speech Motor Control Symposium
May 12, 2023
Abigail Haenssler, postdoctoral fellow, MGH Institute of Health Professions (mentor: Kathryn Connaghan), “Approaches to evaluating speech severity of remote speech recordings”
Jordan Manes, research scientist, Boston University, “fMRI responses to somatosensory perturbations of the jaw and larynx during speech”
Lauren Sullivan, master’s student, Northeastern University (mentor: Kristen Allison), “The effects of SPEAK OUT! & The LOUD Crowd on various speech measures in Parkinson disease”
November 2, 2022
Marc Maffei, doctoral student, MGH Institute of Health Professions (mentor Jordan Green), “Speech motor control in autism spectrum disorder”
Andrew Meier, postdoctoral fellow, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “Speech sequence representations in the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamic loop”
Nicole Tomassi, doctoral candidate, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “Assessing ecologically valid methods of auditory feedback measurement in individuals with typical speech”
2019-20 Meetings
January 29, 2020
Saul Frankford, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “Auditory feedback timing perturbations in adults and children who stutter”
Sandra Hanekamp, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (mentor Kristina Simonyan), “The Large-Scale Structural Connectome of Focal Dystonia”
Laura De Lima Xavier, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary (mentor Kristina Simonyan), “Neural representations of the voice tremor spectrum”
August 30, 2019
Laura Toles, Doctoral Student, MGH Institute for Health Professions (mentor Robert Hillman), “Differences between singers with phonotrauma and matched-controls in singing and speech”
Morgan Hines, Research Assistant, Northeastern University (mentor Emily Zimmerman), “Prenatal Environmental Exposures and its Influence on Early Sucking and Communication Development”
Elaine Kearney, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “SimpleDIVA: A 3-Parameter Model for Examining Adaptation in Speech and Voice Production”
2018-19 Meetings
June 21, 2019
2019 Boston Speech Motor Control Symposium, Details available here.
January 28, 2019
Yeonggwang (Paul) Park, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “Categorization in the perception of breathy voice quality and its relation to voice production in healthy speakers”
Karen Chenausky, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (mentors Helen Tager-Flusberg and Jordan Green), “What can a disordered DIVA tell us about minimally verbal children with autism?”
Elizabeth Heller Murray, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “Vocal motor control differences in school-age children and adults”
September 4, 2018
Katherine Marks, Doctoral Student, MGH Institute for Health Professions (mentor Daryush Mehta), “Impact of non-modal phonation on estimates of subglottal pressure from neck-surface acceleration in healthy speakers”
Gabriel Cler, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “Oral Kinematics of Vowel Nasalization in English”
Terri Scott, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Tyler Perrachione), “Sensorimotor adaptation under non-invasive neurostimulation”
2017-18 Meetings
June 5, 2018
Jennifer Vojtech, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “Effects of modulating fundamental frequency and speech rate on the perception of synthetic speech”
Megan Thompson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther, sharing her dissertation work with Srikantan Nagarajan), “The production of speech and nonspeech sounds in the absence of the vocal tract”
Matthew Masapollo, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “Effects of working memory capacity and chunking on speech motor sequencing”
January 25, 2018
Defne Abur, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “Auditory-motor adaptation of f0 in Parkinson’s disease”
Evan Usler, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, MGH Institute for Health Professions / Boston University (mentor Jordan Green), “ERP and autonomic indices of emotional processing in children who stutter”
Matthias Heyne, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “The influence of native language on brass playing: Motor memory from speech production affects midsagittal tongue shape during trombone performance”
September 20, 2017
Kaila Stipancic, Doctoral Student, MGH Institute for Health Professions (mentor Jordan Green), “Minimally Detectable Change and Minimal Clinically Important Difference of a Decline in Speech Intelligibility and Speaking Rate for Individuals with ALS”
Karen Chenausky, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center (mentor Gottfried Schlaug), “Childhood Apraxia of Speech in Minimally Verbal Children with Autism: Preliminary Findings”
Elaine Kearney, Doctoral Student, Speech-Language Pathology, Rehabilitation Sciences Institute, University of Toronto (mentor Yana Yunusova), “The Speech Movement Disorder in Parkinson’s Disease and its Rehabilitation using Augmented Visual Feedback”
2016-17 Meetings
March 31, 2017
2017 Boston Speech Motor Control Mini-Symposium, Sponsored by BU CRESCENT, Details available here.
December 15, 2016
Christopher Markiewicz, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Jason Bohland), “Multivariate pattern analysis of input and output representations of speech”
Saul Frankford, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “Reliability of fMRI data during speech production tasks”
Austin Rosner, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Mother Infant Research Institute, Tufts Medical Center (mentor Jill Maron, sharing her dissertation work with Steven Barlow), “Shedding light on the brain: Using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to study hemodynamic changes in hand and orofacial sensorimotor cortex”
Aug 23, 2016
Rachelle Horwitz-Martin, Doctoral Student, Harvard University (mentors Jordan Green and Tom Quatieri), “Relation of Automatically Extracted Formant Trajectories with Intelligibility Loss and Speaking Rate Decline in Amyotraphic Lateral Sclerosis”
Elizabeth Heller Murray, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “The Impact of Glottal Configuration on Speech Breathing”
Jenn Segawa, Postdoctoral Associate, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “Neural Representations of Syllabic Structure and Phonemic Content”
2015-16 Meetings
May 3, 2016
Gabriel Cler, Doctoral Candidate, BU (mentor Cara Stepp), “Articulatory Kinematic Analysis of Speech Sound Errors Under Delayed Auditory Feedback”
Fangxu Xing, Postdoctoral Fellow, MGH (mentor Jonghye Woo), “Internal Tongue Motion Analysis from Tagged and Cine Magnetic Resonance Imaging”
January 25, 2016
Tory McKenna, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “The Relationship Between Relative Fundamental Frequency and a Kinematic Estimate of Laryngeal Stiffness in Healthy Adults”
Greg Ciccarelli, Doctoral Student, MIT (mentors John Gabrieli, Satra Ghosh, and Tom Quatieri), “The Vocal Source Modeling and Applications”
Carrie Niziolek, Postdoctoral Associate, Boston University (mentor Swathi Kiran), “Assessing the Neurophysiological Causes of Speech Production Errors in Patients with Aphasia”
September 3, 2015
Kristen Allison, Postdoctoral Research Associate, MGH Institute for Health Professions (mentor Jordan Green), “Early Predictors of Pediatric Dysarthria in Cerebral Palsy”
Jill Thorson, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Northeastern University (mentor Rupal Patel), “Assessing prosody in individuals with congenital versus acquired dysarthria”
Rosemary Lester, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “The Effects of Physiological Adjustments on the Perceptual and Acoustical Characteristics of Vocal Tremor”
2014-15 Meetings
May 19, 2015
Ayoub Daliri, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “Sensorimotor control in adults who stutter”
Gabriel Cler, Doctoral Student, Boston University (mentor Cara Stepp), “Surface electromyographic control of communication interfaces”
Claire Cordella, Doctoral Student, Harvard University (mentor Jordan Green), “Motor speech and linguistic aspects of primary progressive aphasia”
January 9, 2015
Lenny Varghese, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Boston University (mentors Cara Stepp and Barbara Shinn-Cunningham), “Sensorimotor adaptation of nasal acoustics”
Bridget Perry, Doctoral Student, MGH Institute for Health Professions (mentor Jordan Green), “The effects of labial strength training on labial strength and range of motion following full facial transplantation”
Jarrad Van Stan, Doctoral Student, MGH Institute for Health Professions (mentor Robert Hillman), “Development of a two-dimensional virtual environment to study variability in vocal motor learning”
August 1, 2014
Heather Kember, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Northeastern University (mentor Rupal Patel), “Inducing speech errors in dysarthria: A window to cognitive and motor processes”
Panying Rong, Research Fellow, MGH Institute of Health Professions (mentor Jordan Green), “An explanatory model of speech intelligibility decline in persons with ALS”
Elisa Golfinopoulos, Research Scientist, Boston University (mentor Frank Guenther), “Mapping dysfunctional brain activity in adults with adductor spasmodic dysphonia”